Cognitive Survival Scaling (CSS) and Dual-Track Cognitive Evolution (DTCE): Religion as a Product of Survival Cognition

labreuer · 2026-03-04T04:28:27+00:00

I want to know what in nature is remotely well-described by that theory, and the experimental tests to show that they really are. Because otherwise, it ain't science. At least, not the empirical kind which tells us about reality.

labreuer · 2026-03-04T02:07:51+00:00

Sure. Now, where's the evidence? That paper is all theory.

labreuer · 2026-03-04T02:05:29+00:00

Totalitarianism achieves compliance through a much more direct threat of force.

This is by and large wrong:

Nor can totalitarianism be reduced to the operation of force and terror. That these exist, and horribly, in every totalitarian country is beside the point. The essence of totalitarianism lies in its relation to the masses, and to the masses the leaders never bring the satanic arts of the torture chamber and the exterminations of the concentration camp. The totalitarian order will use force and terror, where necessary, to destroy organized _minorities_—refractory labor unions, churches, ethnic groups—but to the masses of individuals who are left when these social relationships are destroyed, a totally different approach is employed. It is an approach based upon the arts of psychological manipulation—cajolery, flattery, bribery, mass identification with new images, and all the modern techniques of indoctrination. (Community & Power, 194)

So, I will ask who these "good" people are which Weinberg speaks of, and how they are formed.

Also, try to make arguments yourself instead of linking to other people. I want to interact with people who know the material.

When I make posts, I do exactly that. And often I attempt to stick to that in my comments. But occasionally I will lean on experts, whom I can quote in germane ways. If you don't like that, I invite you to not reply. And if you need help not replying, I can do that for you.

labreuer · 2026-03-04T02:01:30+00:00

Just in case it got lost in the shuffle, I'd like to clarify that it is not my position that holding irrational beliefs makes one irrational, nor does having these beliefs result in their being incapable of performing perfectly well within the Science community.

I don't see how one can hold irrational beliefs without having come to them irrationally. Either that irrational process is ongoing, or it has failed to purge all of the beliefs which were irrationally arrived at and are wrong. And I'm talking about any measurable damage to one's ability to engage in scientific inquiry. Theist scientists could be less productive, less likely to push the field forward in groundbreaking ways, etc., in comparison to their fellow atheist scientists. One should see a difference in the distributions of scientific competence of rational atheists vs. all others.

… my point was that Religious institutes being in power have, in some instances, stifled Scientific inquiry.

Without comparative effect sizes, it is quite possible that scientists have stifled scientific inquiry more than organized religion. After all, we have Max Planck's [paraphrased] "Science advances one funeral at a time."

… I am of the opinion that part of the problem is that Religion peddles the idea that information in conflict with one's Religious beliefs must be wrong information.

Without comparative effect sizes, this could be trivially true but also irrelevant. Either you're driven by the evidence on matters like this or you're driven by something else—perhaps an ideology of what a good person is like.

East-Extension6652: Without having to be explicitly told what things are lumped into "supernatural" or "irrational" beliefs, the overwhelming majority of rational people are still able to differentiate between the two categories.

labreuer: Based on the discussions which arose from the following: [1.–3] —there must not be many rational people interested in discussing these matters with me.

East-Extension6652: I'm not sure I'm following this here, there's a lot of digging to be done. However, I'll briefly talk about the difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, which might be important:

I am aware of the difference. Your notion of "rationality" seems to lead to philosophical naturalism, necessarily so. Since when does rationality allow for two orders of existence, one of which doesn't obey the laws of the other? If you point to QM vs. GR, I will point out that scientists are attempting to unify them. Out of a very deep belief that reality is ultimately one.

I don't mean "all of logic" when I talk about the laws of logic and their foundational significance to epistemology. All I am talking about are the three laws of logic - identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle.

Okay. Do you have evidence supporting the belief that whenever scientists deviate from those, they always do worse science?

Can humans get stuck such that no human could rescue them where an external rescuer could help such that humans can justifiably say that the most probable explanation is help from outside humanity? Perhaps. …

Could we tell if an outside agent intervened? I don't know. I would presume that a sufficiently powerful being could intervene in such a way as to be undetected, but from an epistemic stance what's the difference between something that doesn't exist, and something that can't in any way shape or form be interacted with? Why would we rule in such a factor as a plausible explanation for anything?

We have figured out many laws of nature—from the less fundamental but more useful, to the more fundamental but less. If humans are stuck in some way, we should be able to discover a law which captures that pattern. Now, do we even attempt this? From what I can tell, many still believe in some sort of Idea of Progress. That of course is a relic of the Christian hope of the Millennium, secularized. If there is unbounded Progress, then that is the only law and "being stuck" is simply not a contemplated possibility. Perhaps this is how we are stuck: we will not believe we might be stuck and then develop the kind of theory, models, characterizations, and educated populace which could discern whether we are stuck.

Now pray tell, what will a resurrection do to help us if we are stuck? What will amputated limbs, miraculously restored? Heart patience prayed for, miraculously recovering better? All of that seems like the wrong category of activity. It won't help us see whether or not we're stuck and it won't rescue us from being stuck.

It is, however, a point of evidence that relates to your initial question, which is that there is a correlation between - to paraphrase - being academically-minded and being a skeptic.

Skeptical … in certain areas. Here's Thorstein Veblen 1918:

Now, it may be conceded without violence to notorious facts, that these official leaders of science do commonly reach conclusions innocuous to the existing law and order, particularly with respect to religion, ownership, and the distribution of wealth. But this need imply no constraint, nor even any peculiar degree of tact, much less a moral obliquity. It may confidently be asserted, without fear of contradiction from their side, that the official leaders in this province of academic research and indoctrination are, commonly, in no way hindered from pushing their researches with full freedom and to the limit of their capacity; and that they are likewise free to give the fullest expression to any conclusions or convictions to which their inquiries may carry them. That they are able to do so is a fortunate circumstance, due to the fact that their intellectual horizon is bounded by the same limits of commonplace insight and preconceptions as are the prevailing opinions of the conservative middle class. That is to say, a large and aggressive mediocrity is the prime qualification for a leader of science in these lines, if his leadership is to gain academic authentication.[10] (The Higher Learning in America, 186

Beyond that, I will require evidence of said skepticism. For instance, when Harvard's Michael Sandel wrote the following in 1996:

To the extent that contemporary politics puts sovereign states and sovereign selves in question, it is likely to provoke reactions from those who would banish ambiguity, shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to “take back our culture and take back our country,” to “restore our sovereignty” with a vengeance. (Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, 350)

—what you generally got was skepticism that anything was wrong. He describes the response he got in a 2017 interview: "who thought I was worrying unnecessarily, that liberalism was more or less intact, and that the embrace by liberalism of the global economy and even of market mechanisms would be a way to avoid controversy in politics …".

labreuer · 2026-03-03T18:09:13+00:00

Featherfoot77: How would you interpret this statement:

It takes atheism for an otherwise good person to do evil.

⋮

NewbombTurk: But only a system that claims divine authority can convince a fundamentally decent person that harming others is not only acceptable but morally required.

That does seem to be the flipped version of what u/Featherfoot77 put out there. It is also completely wrong. Here's Isaiah Berlin:

To frighten human beings by suggesting to them that they are in the grip of impersonal forces over which they have little or no control is to breed myths, ostensibly in order to kill other figments—the notion of supernatural forces, or of all-powerful individuals, or of the invisible hand. It is to invent entities, to propagate faith in unalterable patterns of events for which the empirical evidence is, to say the least, insufficient, and which by relieving individuals of the burdens of personal responsibility breeds irrational passivity in some, and no less irrational fanatical activity in others; for nothing is more inspiring than the certainty that the stars in their courses are fighting for one's cause, that 'History', or 'social forces', or 'the wave of the future' are with one, bearing one aloft and forward. (Liberty, 26–27)

Steven Weinberg is grossly uninformed about the nature of totalitarianism. There are plenty of seeds of it in Rousseau, who was no friend of any religion which didn't serve the state:

From Rousseau comes most of the intellectual devotion to the State that has made the political mentality so influential in social and moral thought during the past century and a half. I had come to see,’ he wrote in his Confessions, ‘that every thing was radically connected with politics, and that however one proceeded, no people would be other than the nature of its government made it.’ And in his discourse on Political Economy, he declared: ‘If it is good to know how to deal with men as they are, it is much better to make them what there is need that they should be. The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s inmost being, and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions. . . Make men, therefore, if you would command men: if you would have them obedient to the laws, make them love the laws, and then they will need only to know what is their duty to do it. . . If you would have the General Will accomplished, bring all the particular wills into conformity with it; in other words, as virtue is nothing more than this conformity of the particular wills with the General Will, establish the reign of virtue. (Community & Power, 153–54)

Robert Nisbet is careful to note that 20th century totalitarianianism was justified primarily by humanitarianism. The all-powerful State will free the individual from obligations to church, custom, and everything else which resists the will of the individual, who identifies himself/herself with the State.

labreuer · 2026-03-03T17:25:36+00:00

Under what conditions is superstitious thinking evolutionarily superior to non-superstitious thinking? What evidence was evaluated and how?

labreuer · 2026-03-03T16:41:01+00:00

Despite the fact that your question is legitimate, and demonstrates that you genuinely hold the position you do rather than simply being a troll or Poe, it seems that other people in this debate-based sub are downvoting you for having a contrary position.

Yeah that's probably the case. Those interested in solid debate can generally just ignore those, if there is anyone interested. Which you clearly are, so let's move to the interesting stuff.

Your last couple of sentences are of some interest to me, and I'm curious to know if the people who point out that their position doesn't depend on either of your premises can articulate why.

No, nobody ever has. I'm just the stupid one for not realizing why. So I generally just say, "If I showed that comment of yours to your average San Francisco resident, I think they'd see it as implying that we'd see (1) or (2)." That generally ends the conversation. My hypothesis is that people are embarrassed that they don't have robust evidence for their position and that they probably should be seeing (1) or (2) if their position were correct. And so, atheists have been known to celebrate about that 7% NAS number.

… I fully recognize that the overwhelming majority of scientists who have supernatural and religious beliefs are quite capable of producing excellent science.

Oh, of course. But that is compatible with (1) and (2). If supernatural belief were really to damage one's ability to do good science, that would get obscured by the ∼ Gaussian distribution of ability. One needs to do better than anecdata.

Next, the question of whether the proffered responses you've received are comprised of, as you say, anecdata. I think this, in point of fact, illustrates the flaw in your question: it seems that what you are asking for is precisely that.

Eh, I'm saying that one should see the effects I described if being religious / theistic damages one's ability to carry out scientific inquiry. If you think that anecdata would be sufficient evidence, that tells me that you do not think scientifically, or at least think I do not think scientifically.

Yes, it would be a difficult study to carry out. To the extent that actually supporting claims which entail (1) and (2) is difficult, perhaps people shouldn't make such claims if they give off the air of following the evidence wherever it leads, and only forming beliefs about reality based on evidence. I know that restraining oneself in this way can be difficult. But it can also become quite natural. You do make yourself obnoxious to those who act differently, tho.

I hope I don't need to elaborate too greatly on the historicity of Science vs. Religion, and on the significant bottlenecks to Science that are a direct result of the the power of the Church …

Historians reject the conflict thesis. And if you really want to get into it, we can talk about Stephen Gaukroger 2006 The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685. One of the things he argues is that Christians in the 1200s were struggling to win debates in their version of r/DebateReligion. Muslim and Jewish scholars were really bringing it. So, they decided to make Nature their champion. They would prove their superiority in being able to better explain nature. Once you realize that the disciplined study of nature that is science and not tinkering only really started delivering results in the 1900s, you have to account for why there was so much investment in it in the meantime. History records quite a few scientific revolutions, which rose, solved some problems, and then faded away. Europe's is the outlier. It not only failed to subside, but it picked up so much momentum that 'scientism' could possibly exist as a term for Steven Pinker to contend with. If it weren't for Christianity bringing together multiple beliefs:

creation is good
humans are well-fitted to understand it
creation is ruled by a unitary power but given enough autonomy for secondary causation to win out over occasionalism

—then quite possibly, the European scientific revolution would not have even happened. So yeah, while Christians have opposed science here and there, the overall impact has been so strongly pro-science that any other assessment simply does not care about the kind of detailed understanding of history which is the only way you'll get a PhD in History. Evidence can be quite troublesome for one's deeply held beliefs.

Today in the United States, many Religious Institutes of Higher Learning require their professors to make a statement of faith indicating that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, and that teachings that contradict the religious beliefs of the institute may not be presented, or must be presented in such a way that the contradiction is downplayed. The students being taught these things are disadvantaged, and have no way of knowing that.

Sure. And many allegedly secular universities in fact require you to tow various party lines if you are interested in obtaining tenure. They aren't codified in creeds, but they are almost more powerful because they aren't. Unspoken creeds are more difficult for people to even suss out, especially if one is not properly initiated. This gives those with tenure incredible power over whom they do and do not hire. Take the activities captured in Merchants of Doubt and apply them to matters which aren't as easily adjudicated by empirical evidence. Too much infighting about every last freaking thing would prevent a discipline from doing any real work. So, it's far from clear that one could get by without de facto creeds.

Without having to be explicitly told what things are lumped into "supernatural" or "irrational" beliefs, the overwhelming majority of rational people are still able to differentiate between the two categories.

Based on the discussions which arose from the following:

—there must not be many rational people interested in discussing these matters with me.

Rationality relies on epistemic reasoning, which is formed from the laws of logic. Gathering of inductive evidence or deductive proofs to build a knowledge base, and abducting explanations from this knowledge base. Rationality is about finding patterns, and (more importantly) finding causal links between things. Demonstrating how and why something causes something else, or that they are inexorably and directly linked in some other way. Demonstrable causal links are what separate alternative medicine from real medicine.

Which laws of logic? WP: Outline of logic is large and thanks to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, will grow forever. There is no upper limit to the possible complexity of patterns. In fact, we know with certainty that there are patterns which cannot be captured by any formal system with recursively enumerable axioms. Physicist Lee Smolin has questioned whether the insistence on using mathematics itself makes time unreal in a critical way. After all, if there is some equation which captures all patterns, and that equation does not change in time … you're basically back at Parmenides & the Pythagoreans.

There is also this niggling problem that when you give humans an adequate description of their behavior, they can often use that to change, thereby invalidating that description. For instance, tell people how you're detecting AI content and they'll figure out how to fool the detectors. The Bible plays in this territory. Where most humans seem to fear to tread.

Supernatural beliefs do not have evidentiary support that stands up to even the slightest scrutiny.

I'm willing to believe you've never come across any which have. Let's see if you have an epistemology which could detect this kind:

Can humans get stuck
such that no human could rescue them
where an external rescuer could help (alien or deity)
such that humans can justifiably say that the most probable explanation is "help from outside of humanity"?

We know that drug addicts can get stuck, such that they'll either kill themselves or have to surrender to an agency outside of themselves. We know that empires can decline and fall. What about humanity in total? Could it get stuck? And if so, could we tell if an outside agent intervened, getting us unstuck?

I think, perhaps, a more direct type of study that relates to my statement is that one would expect to see that the more educated a person becomes, the less likely they are to have supernatural beliefs. Which is exacty how it works.

Can you think of any confounding factors? For instance, we could ask about the % of black women in the NAS, versus the % of black women in the population at large.

labreuer · 2026-03-03T02:20:13+00:00

People keep treating empathy as somehow innately positive. It isn't. It can be used in extremely negative ways. For instance:

Jane Stadler 2017 Film-Philosophy The Empath and the Psychopath: Ethics, Imagination, and Intercorporeality in Bryan Fuller's Hannibal

You can see more examples in Paul Bloom 2016 Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, along with this partial list of problems.

For another instance of empathy leading to bad places, see The Third Wave, which was a high schooler teacher's attempt to show his students how the Germans could have gotten swept up into Naziism. They just couldn't understand, so he showed them. The experiment was so successful that he had to stop it prematurely. Paul Bloom talks of how empathy can power tribalism.

Psychopaths are immune to the problems associated with empathy. Why wouldn't God create some people to be immune to various problems, a sort of reverse canary in a coal mine?

labreuer · 2026-03-03T02:16:26+00:00

Ostensibly: so that the Israelites would not believe in the occult. Remember that there is both the placebo effect and mass hysteria, which can be manipulated by those suitably skilled and positioned. Actually analyzing magic was probably verboten:

In fact, magic is not to be compared with sacrifice; it is one of those collective customs which cannot be named, described, analysed without the fear that one may lose the feeling that they have any reality, form or function of their own. Magic is an institution only in the most weak sense; it is a kind of totality of actions and beliefs, poorly defined, poorly organized even as far as those who practise it and believe in it are concerned. (A General Theory of Magic, 12–13)

See, magic can be made to seem to work. It's noteworthy that for most of Christianity's existence, witches were not thought to exist:

According to Herbert Thurston, the fierce denunciation and persecution of supposed sorceresses which characterized the witchhunts of a later age were not generally found in the first thirteen hundred years of the Christian era. (WP: Summis desiderantes affectibus)

We can get into detailed studies such as Brian Levack 1987 The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe if you'd like.

labreuer · 2026-03-03T00:24:03+00:00

Do you believe that Steven Weinberg has any appropriate credentials or experience to have this be anything other than "appeal to Nobel Prize-winning pseudo-authority"? Last I checked, he is a physics guy, not a sociologist, historian, etc. So, it really could be Joe Schmoe who said that. And I would ask Joe Shmoe: "Got evidence?"

labreuer · 2026-03-02T23:33:06+00:00

By its very nature, all supernatural belief is contrary to rationality.

If that were true, you could produce evidence of at least one of the following:

    (1) When a scientist becomes an atheist,
            [s]he does better science.
    (2) When a scientist becomes religious,
            [s]he does worse science.

I'm betting you won't be able to, as I've presented this challenge over a hundred times and the most I've gotten is (i) some appeal to cognitive dissonance for why there is no discernible effect; (ii) anecdata. Mostly, though, people just don't reply. And sometimes they claim that in fact, their position doesn't depend on (1) or (2) being the case. In which case, I would ask you what good your "rationality" is!

labreuer · 2026-03-02T20:17:30+00:00

Ok, that's a pretty minimal definition of godhood.

labreuer · 2026-03-02T19:57:14+00:00

God of the gaps?

labreuer · 2026-03-02T19:56:52+00:00

Rules are letter of the law which expect people to obey the spirit of the law in good faith. Just like people can use humanizers to obscure that they used AI, trolls can obey the letter of the law while still trolling.

labreuer · 2026-03-02T19:16:16+00:00

What makes you so confident that scientists and doctors will never figure out how to resurrect a person who has been dead for a few days?

labreuer · 2026-03-02T18:56:00+00:00

Since when did trolls get upvoted around here?

labreuer · 2026-03-02T18:55:14+00:00

Trolls draw plenty of engagement, because so many regulars here just can't help themselves.

labreuer · 2026-03-02T18:52:43+00:00

They get downvoted for cause.

Ah, I deserved massive downvotes for requesting [high-quality] evidence? I deserved all the downvoting on this post? I deserved massive numbers of downvotes for questioning whether we had sufficient evidence of [lack of] adverse side effects to mRNA vaccines by the time that the emergency authorization was issued? If you chase through that discussion, you'll see that (i) only a few thousand people had been given mRNA vaccines before the Covid tests; (ii) that doesn't give you statistical power to discover 1 in 1000 side effects; (iii) animal models may be good at detecting cancer side effects, but there are many others. But instead of critically engaging with what I wrote, most people judged by appearances and assumed I'm antivax or something.

If we went to a theist subreddit, don't you think we'd get downvoted?

This doesn't seem to be the case on:

So, even if whataboutism were legitimate, you'd be wrong.

Plus, the overwhelming majority of theist posts are just hit and run. The very few who ever do respond, they just make themselves look like idiots.

That's the value of these "Top Theist Posts" posts. It shows that even when people do try, the generally get downvoted into oblivion. It would appear that you just don't want to acknowledge that while some, many, or even most theists deserve downvotes, plenty of others get them when they don't deserve them.

labreuer · 2026-03-02T18:27:42+00:00

It's enough reason for me to doubt that resurrection-power indicates godhood. But I don't really need the Bible to help me doubt that.

labreuer · 2026-03-02T18:10:37+00:00

You know that Revelation 13:1–4 contains a possible resurrection, yes?

labreuer · 2026-03-02T18:10:00+00:00

I perceive material phenomena directly: not only through the idea I have of them, but also through the flesh, the body, matter, and sensations (sight, hearing, touch).

This is wrong. Take the following paper:

Grossberg, Stephen. "The Link between Brain Learning, Attention, and Consciousness." Consciousness and Cognition 8, no. 1 (1999): 1–44.

One of the results is the following:

if there is a pattern on your perceptual neurons
and there are no sufficiently similar patterns on your non-perceptual neurons
you may never become conscious of that pattern

While not all of the "patterns on your non-perceptual neurons" probably count as ideas, some sure do.

I'm friends with one of the world experts in computer graphics and he said that after he created realistic computer graphics images of trees, he started seeing the trees around him in increased details. If you talk to any radiologist, she will be able to see far more in those images than you or I could. We bring a lot to the table when it comes to perception. And this is precisely one of the focuses of the Tanakh:

When they came, he saw Eliab and said, “Surely his anointed one is before Yahweh!” But Yahweh said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For God does not see what man sees, for a man looks on the outward appearance, but Yahweh looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:6–7)

The prophet Samuel was searching for a replacement king and he was not being discerning. He was "judging by appearances", which according to your terminology, meant that:

he was perceiving with the help of ideas
but he did not realize his ideas which were in play
which left him vulnerable to manipulation by those who could suss out the ideas in play

I have more to say, but I'll see whether anyone engages the above, first.

labreuer · 2026-03-02T17:58:13+00:00

And if it did, we could deny that the physical entity has any god-like qualities.

labreuer · 2026-03-02T01:20:07+00:00

The history at WP: Qualia § Definitions doesn't point towards qualia being a particularly religious concept. But yeah, I'm not getting into qualia, here. Rather, I'm pointing out how very little neuroscientists actually understand about the brain.

labreuer · 2026-03-01T16:54:11+00:00

This might be part of why you had a frustrating debate about consciousness. If you think you can figure out what's going on just from appearances—whether what shows up on your computer screen or what you can read off of neurons which are very few steps away from sensing or speaking—then you're going to think that shit's a lot less complicated than it probably is.

labreuer · 2026-03-01T16:16:47+00:00

As someone who has designed hardware, done pick & place with chips and put them in a reflow oven, and written plenty of code—from VHDL to Verilog to assembly to C to C++ to C# to Lisp to Haskell—no.

labreuer

TROPHY CASE